Nearly everyone in the Rim Federation has heard of the Rao: prolific, aggressive, large insectoids whose empire as laid waste recently by an unknown force. Stumbled upon by a Rim survey group just prior to the outbreak of the Armageddon War, the Rao have been beaten brutally down but the forces that did so have not hung around to lay claim to the deed. As a race, the Rao seem to thrive in nearly every climate but thankfully are not voracious conquerors or particularly evil, although they do live their lives in massive ant-like colonies, with between 50 and 100 million Rao in a single city-colony. Building extensive hive structures, the Rao came to dominate their home planet many millennia past, even building large surface cities whose remarkable construction can be today, even if most are in ruins. The Rao are a somewhat benign hive mind race (taking into consideration the Arachnids) and their homeworld is Troma Rao, one of the largest terrestrial planets in the known galaxy (it is easily more than ten times the diameter of Earth), largely covered in highly active volcanoes, pyroclastic clouds, and stinking oceans. The estimated population of Troma Rao was easily over one trillion beings before the planet was orbitally bombarded and all its’ surface cities laid waste. Curious and aggressive, the Rao developed space travel nearly 9,000 years ago (according to their data records) and became a truly powerful interstellar society within a small isolated pocket empire near “the Jambles”. Their exodus to the stars was, in part, instinctive, for to do otherwise would have caused the Rao to engage in constant battle among themselves to maintain their population at the proper levels. Even in space, warring factions of Rao battled one another to prove their superiority or to seize a colony or resource. Several years ago they stumbled upon a vastly more powerful and vicious foe, who occupied and then bombarded all the Rao Center Worlds into oblivion.